


Arrival

by NimbleJack3



Category: Mass Effect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-05
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-12 00:01:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5646601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NimbleJack3/pseuds/NimbleJack3
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Commander Shepard, war criminal on trial for 300,000 counts of murder, finally meets in the flesh the one enemy she cannot kill herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Arrival

Shepard heard the door's servos whine. She didn't need to turn around to see, but she heard Vega step into the room and the crisp shuffle of his salute. "Commander."  
His idolization of the N7s was endearing at first, but now the constant puppy-like enthusiasm and questions about the program were wearing thin. She wished for once he'd just clam up and glare like the MPs.  
"You're not supposed to call me that anymore, Lieutenant Vega."  
"Not supposed to salute you, either."  
Shepard turned to meet his gaze and stance with her very best tired stare, but was briefly thrown off by the lack of the usual vibrant grin. Vega plowed on. "We gotta go; the Defence Comittee wants to see you."  
Shepard shrugged. They'd been calling her up before the tribunal all week, working their way through a number of witnesses in the Fifth Fleet who'd handled her mission orders for Bahak. She was probably going to sit through another ensign's story of data entry. Again. "Sounds important."  
"Couldn't say. Just told me they needed you... now."  
Shepard easily kept pace with Vega down the detention block corridor, legs settling into long, determined strides as her brow furrowed. The lieutenant wasn't usually like this. Something must be wrong. Shepard's unease only grew as she saw Admiral Anderson for the first time in months, wearing full dress uniform and approaching from the other direction. She felt the world sway slightly, possibilities running through her head. Had the tribunal suddenly come to a decision? Was she being led to sentencing, or worse? She extended her hand in greeting on autopilot.

"Anderson."  
Shepard could practically feel Vega snap to attention behind her. "Admiral!"  
Both of the N7s ignored him, shaking hands and moving onwards. "You look good, Shepard. Maybe a little soft around the edges." Anderson gave Shepard a playful backhand to her toned shoulder. "How you holding up since being 'relieved from duty'?"  
"It's not so bad, once you get used to the hot food and soft beds."  
"We'll get that sorted out."  
Shepard grinned. Three meals a day was overkill for someone who didn't need to sleep for a couple days at a time, let alone eat. She relaxed slightly, at ease in the presence of someone she knew and knew her back. "What's going on? Why's everyone in such a hurry?"  
"Admiral Hackett's mobilizing the fleets."  
Shepard felt herself absorb the shock. One of her worst guesses was starting to become a dark horse ascendant as Anderson continued to explain.  
"I'm guessing word's made it to Alliance Command - something big's headed our way."  
Shepard forced the word through her mouth. "Reapers?"  
"We don't know. Not for certain."  
"What else could it be?"  
"If I knew that..."  
"It's the Reapers. And we're not ready for them; not by a long shot."  
"Tell that to the Defence Committee."  
To the panel? But why would the tribunal want to know..?  
"Unless we're planning to talk the reapers to death, the Committee is a waste of time."  
"They're just scared. None of them have seen what you've seen. You've faced down a reaper. Hell, you spoke to one, then blew the damn thing up!"  
Anderson punctuated the recount with his fist flying open, miming Sovereign's defeat nearly three years ago. Shepard missed it, lost in the theater of total genocidal war playing across the inside of her head, barely registering their route through the building.  
"You've seen how they harvest us. What they plan to do to us. You know more about this enemy than anyone."  
Shepard stopped, and turned to face down Anderson. "So why does it feel like I'm marching to a firing squad? Do they plan on throwing me away once they've shaken their intel out of me?"  
Anderson cut her off with a sideways chop of his hand. "You know that's not true."  
Shepard narrowed her eyes, challenging his optimism, but Anderson scowled and put himself closer.  
"When you blew up the batarian relay, hundreds of thousands of batarians died!"  
"It was that or let the Reapers walk through our back door."  
"I know that, Shepard. And so does the committee. If it wasn't for that, you'd have been court-martialed already and left to rot in the brig."  
"That, and your good word."  
Shepard was being childish, she knew. Pushing Anderson on how he'd been favouring her and trying to spring her from the charges was idiocy - but she was tired of being treated like a delicate child. They both knew her feelings on batarians. She'd made her choice in Bahak. And once before, on Torfan. She wanted to know what the consequences were, sooner rather than later. Anderson looked like he was about to escalate into an argument, but let it go. "Right now, the committee needs to trust you."  
"I'm a soldier, not a politician."  
"And I don't need you to be either. Just tell us whatever the hell it is it'll take to stop the Reapers."  
A well-trimmed junior officer stopped in front of them to briefly bar the way, holding out a data-pad. "They're expecting you two, Admiral."  
The doors of the courtroom loomed behind the young officer, and they stepped aside to let them through as Anderson took custody of the pad.

"Good luck in there, Shepard."  
She'd almost forgotten that Vega was still shadowing them. She waved him off as he veered away to wait outside. Coming the other way through the doors was a another sudden face from a much older past, relatively speaking.  
"Anderson. Shepard."  
Shepard stared at the no.2 Human Spectre. "Ashley?"  
Anderson shook Ashley's hand and took hold of the conversation while Shepard digested her old Gunnery Chief's appearance. "Lieutenant-Commander. How'd it go in there?"  
"I can never tell with them. I'm just waiting for orders, now." Ashley scowled, her impatience plainly visible.  
"Lieutenant-Commander?" Shepard inquired.  
"You hadn't heard?"  
"No. I'm out of the loop these days."  
Ashley stood slightly more to attention. "Sorry ma'am. Didn't mean to keep you out of the loop."  
Shepard took the backhanded apology in stride. "It's not like you learned the reapers were coming and didn't tell me."  
"True enough."  
The junior officer from before reappeared, reminding them that a panel of brass was waiting for them to finish their conversation. "Admiral?"  
Anderson nodded to Shepard. "Come on."  
Shepard kept her gaze bearing straight ahead as she passed Lieutenant-Commander Williams. Vega sauntered up from where he had been waiting, approaching her. "You knew the commander?"  
"I used to."

Shepard and Anderson's approach into the courtroom was quickly hailed by the bench at the far end of the courtroom. Officers were crawling all over the room in a chaotic dance. This clearly wasn't more hearings - this felt more like the lightning before the storm, the smell of shit before it hit the fan. "Admiral Anderson. Shepard."  
She didn't miss the lack of rank attached to her name. To half the brass, she was persona non grata. The other half would rather her be persona non vivus, and shot for her crimes. Thanks to Anderson, the panel was more the former than the latter. Shepard turned her head up to address them. "What's the situation?""We were hoping you could tell us."  
Anderson passed her the data-pad, and she scrolled through a dozen system defence reports while each senior officer on the panel spoke in turn.  
"The reports coming in are unlike anything we've ever seen."  
She could feel the tension start to build beneath the N7 conditioning as she read account after account of total relay blackout.  
"Whole colonies have gone dark. We've lost contact with everything beyond the Sol relay."  
Shepard's head snapped up. Cut off, like the old days where humanity's universe centered on the Sun?  
"Whatever this is, it's incomprehensibly powerful."  
She'd had enough. They were trying to skirt around the truth. "So you brought me here to confirm what you already know," Shepard swallowed and forced the words out again, "that the Reapers are here."  
A susurration started up amongst the officers supporting the courtroom. People bristled as they digested what Shepard had just announced.  
"Then... how do we stop them?"  
" _Stop_ them? This isn't going to be about strategy or tactics. It's going to be about survival!"  
Shepard paused as she suddenly found the entire board (and everyone else within earshot) leaning towards her, listening to see if there was any golden glimmer of hope in the shit speeding towards the fan. She had to plow on. "The Reapers are more advanced than we are. More powerful. More intelligent. They don't fear us, and they'll never take pity on us."  
She could see the board deflating, their hopes dying in the iron face of impending demise. "But - there must be some way!"  
"Each of us has to be willing to die to save humanity! Anything less, and they've already won."  
"That's it? That's our plan?!"  
Shepard was about to start arguing with the board member when an officer from the side of the courtoom looked up from her station. "Admiral! We've lost contact with Luna Base."  
Anderson and the board recoiled, taken aback by the sudden implication. "The Moon? They couldn't be that close already..."  
"How did they get past our defences?"  
Another officer chimed in. "Sir! UK headquarters has a visual!"  
The courtroom's main display along one wall flickered, displayed nothing for a moment, then erupted in a heavily-degraded view of a soldier hurriedly ranting into his end of the connection. There was fire. It didn't look like the inside of-

There was a heavy, electronic bass rumble, barely audible through the noise of the attenuated signal, before something unpleasantly familiar, yet horribly alien, landed behind the soldier. There was a flurry of movement and noise before suddenly the feed died. It had all taken only a few seconds.

The courtroom flew into frenzied life, officers bringing up news feeds and other footage across the displays to paint a horrifying picture: the Reapers had just landed on Earth. The Reapers had landed - and Alliance brass had been busy in a locked courtroom talking to each other about day-old reports when it had happened. Someone had paused and cropped a still of the distinctive squid-feather silhouette across some city skyline, already decimated. Shepard was transfixed by it, taking in as much detail of the horrific scene as she could. Anderson broke her reverie with a hand on her shoulder. "Why haven't we heard from Admiral Hackett?"  
A panicked panel member turned forward to address Shepard as well. "What do we _do_?"  
Shepard strode forward, vindicated by the world burning outside. "The only thing we _can_ do. We fight, or we die!"Anderson stepped forward to match her. "We should get to the Normandy."  
Shepard opened her mouth to reply when she felt a deep vibration through the floor. The room went silent as everyone felt the building judder, ever so slightly. The panel members turned their seats around and stood up to peer through the landscape window behind them, when suddenly impossibly huge black appendages descended through the dim afternoon clouds and into the Vancouver skyline. A Reaper, mind-shatteringly graceful despite its' size, dwarfed the skyscrapers as it somehow slowed and touched down in the middle of the city. Shepard felt herself tighten up, the N7 conditioning kicking in and keeping her lucid as adrenaline, cortisol and a dozen other chemicals surged. The panel stood and stared, unable to grasp the full implications of what they were seeing.  
"Oh my god."  
There was a glimmer, and a red glint in the 'mouth' of the Reaper's almost squid-like form. Shepard tensed, her perception slowing as she fell deeper into readiness from a cold start. The glint instantly spat a full beam, which walked across the city, then the river, then started to arc towards the building as Shepard breathed in to scream...  
"MOVE! GO, GO GO!"

The landscape window, once so peaceful and pretty, exploded inwards as the beam raked the city block they were in. The panel's imposing table was thrown forward like a toy, hurtling down the length of the courtroom with deadly and unstoppable momentum, throwing people under it and to the side. Shepard was already halfway to the side of the room, arms and legs streaming as fast as she could move them, when the table won and slammed into her. She felt that tightness inside her recoil, fighting to keep her aware as the giant desk careened above her and below her and into her as it carried her down the courtroom and slammed her into the wall before smashing into a hundred chunks. There were a few lost moments as her augmentation fought the damage, medigel seeping into and out of wounds, foaming and expanding and sealing her shut before more damage could be done. She slid once into fuzzy fugue, rising back out to the screams of the injured and frightened, to the courtroom on fire, and to Anderson gripping her hand and pulling her upright before shoving his backup sidearm into her hand.

"Shepard! Come on, get up! Take this. We've got to get moving."


End file.
